There’s one particular UK webhost that’s investing heavily in advertising right now, with a campaign claiming that server speed directly impacts your website’s effectiveness in Google, to the extent that Google actually penalises slow loading websites.

Personally, I’m not 100% convinced, and even if Google does pay attention to speed of the server (load speed of the page is another matter) then I’m sure it’s significance is minor compared to many other things I’d consider first if my SEO needed improving.

That said…  a fast loading website (helped by a fast server) is clearly an important thing – moreso for users looking to minimise the time they spend hunting down info or browsing for products/services to buy online. 

At NSDesign, we had a hunch that our servers were among the fatest in the UK, especially since we’re what you might call a “budget host” (at £25 for a standard shared linux host – we’re certainly in the “budget” price range), so we did a little research…

Independant “performance benchmarking” site www.webperf.net lists 170 UK Webhosts, and regularly tests their performance (measuring the Mean Rate in K/Sec – ie: the speed!).  We’re currently at a respectable position 16, well ahead of many of the major Hosting “giants” (the ones you see advertising full page in .NET magazine).  A quick check of the 15 hosts above us, and it’s no surprise that on average, most of these companies charge considerably more than us, with a few just specialising in providing high-end dedicated servers (no end-user hosting at all).

Something to proud of for certain, but how do we compare to the uk host that’s claiming to be so fast that even google prefers them?  Well – unfortunately they don’t list themselves in Webperf, so we resorted to a quick a simple speed test of their own website homepage using www.alertra.com and also did the exact same on the NSDesign.co.uk homepage.

Once we’ve removed the duplicate test locations, the above results show that on average (across the globe), we’re over 60% faster, and when tested in the UK (the London test), our access was over 40% quicker.  FORTY PERCENT quicker than (if we believe the hype) one of the UK’s fastest hosting companies.  Not bad for a little webhost from Glasgow.  Maybe helps explain why our own Google Search listings are so highly placed….  page1, position1 for keywords such as “Web Hosting Glasgow”, and “Linux Hosting Scotland”.  Server speed, or just damn fine SEO?  You can decide, but no matter the conclusion, well done us

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It’s been a busy few weeks on the web, with a number of promised “killer apps” released or announced.  There’s certainly some exciting new sites to play with, but is that all we’ll end up doing – “playing” with them, or will they actually live up to their hype, and change the way we use the web today.  You decide…

Google Wave
Launching later this year, Google Wave could potentially bring about one of the most significant chanages to the way we communicate online since email.  Yes – it really is big news!!  As Lars Rasumussen (Google Wave developer) put it, “Wave is what email would look like if it were invented today.”

If you can find the time (1 hour and 20 mins!), I urge you to watch the video at http://wave.google.com/ and let Google themselves explain it, but essentially Wave is a hybrid communication and collaboration tool, combining email, instant messaging, live chat, wikis, social networking and project management, all in one simple (lets hope so) browser based application.  Head over to the Mashable website for a much more detailed explaination and a summary of all the features.

While it’s not yet live, Google Wave has already been met with a wave (sorry) of enthusiasm from the web community – from designers, developers, users, and industry experts alike.  Let’s hope that when released to the masses (expected to be towards the end of the year) it doesn’t fail to live up to it’s high expectations

Bing
Bing is the new Search Engine from Microsoft, and unlike previous efforts, this one might actually take a slice from the Google pie. So what does the self proclaimed “decision engine” claim to do that’s different from the norm:

• Instant Answers: finds specific answers to informational queries, e.g. “What is 55F in Celsius” offers rich media and structured data and a general search term like “weather” yields a 5-day forecast for your location.
• Preview: enables searchers to find out more information about a site by previewing individual results on the results page to reduce back-and-forth searching.
• Best Match: delivers results with deep links and highly relevant information to help searchers to get the right information faster. 

For webmasters, you can access the Google-like “webmaster tools“, to help better understand how Bing sees your site, and allows you to view stats and submit sitemaps etc.

Early indications are that Bing is being pretty well received by the web search community, although what impact it will have on Google will not be seen for some time yet, but given that they’re reportedly spending $100 million on promoting it, clearly Microsoft are taking this seriously and boast that Bing is just the “first step in a long journey” for their search plans (Qi Lu – Head of Microsoft’s online services).

Wolfram Alpha
It’s own first paragraph explains this new “Computational Knowledge Engine” as “the first step in an ambitious, long-term project to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone”.  In a nutshell – it claims to provide answers to questions that other search engines (ie: Google) will not provide.

As I test, I used a fairly simple question: “how far is it from Glasgow to London”, and it promptly told me it was 344 miles and showed a nice little map.  Like the examples on their homepage, this is fairly basic stuff, but the simplicity of asking a question in plain English, and receiving one definative answer (instead of the 578,000 results Google gave me) is pretty significant.  To be honest – it’s a different beast to Google altogether, and where it will excel is in “computing” things, not “searching” for websites containing your search terms.

Check out http://www.semanticuniverse.com/blogs-i-was-positively-impressed-wolfram-alpha.html for a good (and suitable geeky) review.

Google Squared
A direct challenger to the Wolfram Alpha site, Google’s been quick to release their own
Unlike typical search, Google Squared extracts data from other web sites, and presents the results as “squares” within what can only be described as an online spreadsheet.  A quick example searching for “Glasgow Web Design” presented me with a nice table of just that – Web Design companies in Glasgow (with NSDesign thankfully within the first page of results!)..

The primary difference between Google Squared and Wolfram Alpha, is that the latter searches only it’s own Databases (currently holding approx 10TB of information), while Google Squared attempts to search the entire data on the web.  How much we’ll all use such a tool on a day to day basis is difficult to predict, but it’s certainly a great start at strcutured searching, with everything is neatly labeled and categorised.
So – Killer Apps, or pleasast distractions from a busy day in the office…?  Time will tell.

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Back in the mid to late 1990’s I had the pleasure of working for a pretty cutting edge research group called ABACUS – part of the Architecture Department at the University of Strathclyde.

Much of the work we were involved in was focussed around the use of IT (and later the web) to Architecture and the Built Environment, and Abacus developed what was at the time one of the biggest 3D city models – 25 square kilometres of Glasgow City Centre.

In 1998, I was challenged with the task of making the model available online, and using new and exciting visualisation technologies such as VRML (Virtual Reality Modelling Language) and QTVR (Quick Time Virtual Reality) – carried out a prolonged R+D period which resulted in a system we called “The Glasgow Directory”.

In short – An interactive Map/3D Model which accurately gave a true reflection of the real city with layers of data accessed on request. Our urban information system allowed web-based users to explore and “walk around” the virtual Glasgow model, highlighting areas of interest such as key city landmarks, tourist resources and more, with fancy 360 degree panoramic views of selected street-scapes… this sounding at all familiar yet?

When the Glasgow Directory was launched, it was very well received within the web research world, particularly those working in the field of VRML and city visualisation. As a result, I was fortunate enough to present a number of academic papers at various locations across Europe, highlighting our innovative system, and explaining our ideas to take it further in the future. Anyone know if Larry Page or Sergey Brin visited around that time?..

Ok – being serious – I don’t actually think that Google based their Google Maps (and more recently – Google Street View) on the VRML Glasgow Directory, but in retrospect, some of the similarities are astounding….

Above… George Square and the City Chambers… both systems have the ability to explore the “virtual space”, identify the street names, buildings of interest etc…

 Glasgow Catherdral from the roadside….  left is the VRML Glasgow Directory, right is Google StreetView

  Using the Map as an information system, searching for a good Bar in the Merchant City – in this case Bar 91

Unfortunately, much of the original source for the Glasgow Directory is now lost. Regrettably this includes a lot of the later research and development including embedding realtime audio, location specific navigation feedback (VERY similar in nature to Google Maps on the iPhone with GPS) and multi-user “avatar” based interactions.

Some links to material and examples that I did manage to dig up:

Working Glasgow Directory (kind of) – requires a VRML client such as the Cortona Plugin

Research Stuff:
Inside The Map – Academic Paper written by myself for a Cartography Conference
Visit VR Glasgow  – Academic Paper written by Myself and Prof. Tom Maver

So Google.. if you’re reading this… own up – was it me that invented Google Maps, Google Earth and Google Street View? I’ll assume that I did until I hear back from you. In the meantime, I’m off to dig out that primitive working example of an online video sharing site that I remember showing to some Paypal employees back in 2001…

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Last week Google published a nice blog post entitled Quick and easy tips for the holiday rush.

It offers some great simple tips to get your website SEO in shape so that Google can better understand and index it, driving more traffic and generating more sales.  All sounds easy, and to be honest – most of it is not exactly rocket science, but of course if you’d like help with any of Google’s suggestions – things like:

• snippet content and titles
• labeled images
• 404 and 301 errors
• sitemaps
• sitelinks

Then get in touch and we’d be glad to help out!  Our own Search Engine Optimisation Programme deals with all the above and much more.

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One of the important concerns to web designers is striking a balance between the creative aspect of a website in terms of style and media and being able to implement the design into an accessible and standards compliant site which can be read by search engines. Web technologies have come a long way in a short time in helping to achieve this with xhtml, css and javascript providing a more flexible way of realising ideas while maintaining clean, structured code and accessibility standards. More recently newer developments are becoming available which are pushing the possibilities of the web and raising the bar in the flexibility designers and developers have. As long as the ideas keep flowing on what we would like to achieve on the web, the technology will continue to advance inorder to match this.

CSS3

Css3 has been in development for a few years but is now beginning have some of its features supported better. There a number of interesting features which have been developed to meet design trends, so as to make the implementation of these stylings easier, though many of them are still currently unsupported by browsers, especially Internet Explorer. Some of the features include:

- Multi column allows the developer to position blocks of text in several columns similar to print.

- Rounded corners can be achieved on elements by setting a radius on the corner.

- Border images allow the developer to create custom shaped elements by setting graphics for each corner and sides of an element.These 3 features are only currently supported in Firefox and Safari 3.

- Border color allows gradient borders to be used though are currently only supported by Firefox.

- HSL colors have been introduced, which aswell as setting the colour also allows you to set the hue, saturation and lightness of colours, providing a lot more flexibility in colour schemes. So far this is supported by Opera 9.5, Safari 3, Konqueror and Mozilla.

- One of the most popular features of css3 is opacity. This can be set on different elements allowing a gradient effect to be achieved. This is supported by most browsers except Internet Explorer.

- Box sizing is an interesting one as previously padding and borders were always added to the width of an element but now can be added inside a div. Firefox and Safari support this with the prefix -moz- and -webkit- respectively though Opera simply works with box-sizing.

- Font-face was included in css2 but was only supported by Internet Explorer if an .eot font format was used but Safari 3.1 now allows Truetype or Opentype font to be implemented in designs.

Flash accessibility.

Flash has always been a blessing and curse to both developers and users. It can achieve unique interactive experiences for users and bring a site to life but with search engines unable to extract text or links from the file, it has made flash sites often inaccessible and difficult to index. In the last 6 months it was announced by Google and Adobe that the algorithm Google uses is dramatically changing which will allow text and links from flash files to be read and allow sites to be indexed better in search results. Adobe is developing a flash reader for search engines which will allows the files to be read. Another technology which employs Flash and provides developers with more flexibility in terms of typefaces on the web in Sifr. This is a type replacement technology which allows any typeface to be employed in a website. Its fully accessible with all major browsers and can be read by screen readers.

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With very little fanfare, Google has added a feature to their Search Engine that could have a big impact on how people use and “influence” the results.

Searchwiki is a new feature available to logged in Google users, which allows you to add, remove and “promote” any of the returned results from a specific search.  You can also add notes to any of the results, allowing you to leave little reminders about what you think of the site.

To see this in action:

Sign into your Google account (you’ll have one if you use GMail, Adwords, Google Calendar, or any of the online Google tools that require a login).  Then on the Google search page, do a search for “Glasgow Web Design“…  Then scroll right to the bottom, and click “See all notes for this SearchWiki” 

What you should see is our “notes” that we left for our own site, and confirmation that we “promoted” our link under this search term. 

Only you (while logged in) see the results re-organised the way you’ve specified, but other Google users DO get to see your comments, and also get to see which sites have been promoted or removed by other users.  Which brings up some concerns… 

What if someone writes a nasty (or libelous) note tagged to your site.  Eg: “don’t use these mechanics – they ripped us off”…  How does the owner of that garage reply, or ask Google to remove these comments?  What if he doesn’t even know such comments exist?  Will the volume of visitors slowly decrease until Google sends him no traffic?

If Google’s SearchWiki is indeed a wiki, then where are the methods to complain about a note, or request that factually incorrect notes be taken down.  Personally I think this new feature may do more harm than good…  and it’ll be interesting to see how Google deal with the barrage of complaints that they’re sure to get! 

Also – how long before the organic results (those that everybody sees on Google) actually start being influenced by “promoters” of sites?  If we get all our customers to “promote” the NSDesign website under the search term “web design”, will the fact that 1000’s of people have gone out of their way to tell google it’s a better site than the rest actually see Google move it up the organic results?  They say NO, but for how long…?

Read Google’s own announcement of SearchWiki at the Google Blog.

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Having recently celebrated it’s 10th birthday (watch this space for details of NSDesign’s 10th birthday early next  year), Google continues to be busy on the development front, releasing a number of new products and services recently.

Two of my favourites so far – Google Chrome – their new web browser, and Mail Googles, a fun addition to their GMail platform that might save a few people from sending the occasional dodgy email late on a Friday night while under the influence…

Chrome is big news in the web world – 1) Because it’s a new browser from Google, and 2) Because it brings with it the possibility of another browser war, with Google’s rivalry with Microsoft stronger than ever.

We’ll post our own review of Chrome soon, but for now, suffice to say that Google’s first effort into the world of browsers does a decent job, and most importantly, seems to be pretty much standards-compliant (being based on the Webkit engine which powers Apple’s Safari) which should save a few headaches from a design/development point of view.  Read Bruce Lawson’s “On Google Chrome” for a more detailed evaluation and opinion.

A million miles from the “strategic move” that is Chrome, Google also announced Mail Googles.  Had it been April 1st I’d have thought it a joke, but think about it a little deeper, and it’s really not a bad idea!..  We’ve had many a domain order, placed at 3am (you know who you are!) from customers returning from the pub…  Many of which are on the phone next day trying to ask for their money back…  “Can I get a refund for ScottyKingofBeer.com please?  I don’t really remember ordering it…  Maybe we’ll follow Google and introduce something similar…  then again….

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A major factor in achieving high search rankings is of course relevant inbound linking. Google analyses not only the quantity but the quality and relevance of the inbound links to your site to determine how important a result it is. This method, alongside keyword optimisation techniques has improved the relevance of search results greatly. Though as is the case with many aspects of the web, this system has in recent times been abused.

There are many websites which buy and sell inbound links to sites which disregard link quality and pass page rank, which has allowed the search results to be manipulated. However in 2007 Google made significant efforts to stamp down on this paid linking practice, enforcing penalties in terms of search ranking and page rank passing ability to the sites carrying it out. The result of this ongoing campaign by Google will be felt in 2008 as the websites who have worked to optimise their sites and legitimately gain quality, relevant links will begin to rise in the ranking and the sites which relied on paid links will begin to slip.

Quick Linking Tips

1. A good way to gain relevant links to your site is to get registered in appropriate online directories which are related to your business. Many of these directories request much the same information although have different limits on the number of characters available etc and registering can be a tedious process. An idea is to create a basic “submission kit” text file with brief promotional copy for your site in a few different formats including a one sentence description and 25, 30 and 70 word descriptions containing your keywords aswell as contact details and prewritten hyper links which can be pasted in quickly. A good directory to be on is Google’s Business Listings: http://www.google.com/local/add
2. Try writing informative and interesting articles which relate to your field of expertise and submit them regularly online. There are several quality article and blog sites where you can submit free articles. Be sure to include your necessary keywords in the article and make use of the hyperlinks the sites allow you to put in at the bottom. Use your keywords here aswell to link back to your site. Articles are especially useful for new sites looking to get spidered quickly. A good article submission site is : http://www.ezinearticles.com
3. Yahoo offers a reliable service which analyses which sites are providing inbound links to other sites. To look at this type “link:domain” into Yahoo’s search engine to get an idea who your competitors are being linked to by. This should provide ideas on where to look for acquiring quality inbound links which are relevant to your business. Yahoo’s version of this tool is more accurate than Google’s.

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When AJAX started to become popular, more and more people started to provide great usable websites improving the user experience, and even applications based on the web started to appear.   Javascript frameworks allow developers to create great applications providing them with complete libraries, unfortunately these frameworks are a quite heavy component of the website.  And here comes the news of today.

Google has just launched a new service, Google Ajax Libraries API, basically some of the main frameworks are hosted on Google servers and available with the intention to reduce the amount of data that the users browser has to download every time it is visiting a different website that uses an AJAX framework.

Clearly the advantages are not only for the users but also for those who own a website using this service, by saving the server bandwidth, offering visitors a faster website, and not having to worry about staying up to date with the framework updates.

The frameworks available at the moment are jQuery, prototype, script.aculo.us, MooTools and dojo.

Sometimes I ask myself what Google still hasn’t invented yet?

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Ok – so we’re not actually for sale (before we get clients phoning in a panic), unless of course Microsoft wants to come in and offer $40 billion to aquire a thriving web design and consultancy company from Glasgow – the value they placed on Yahoo just last week, when they attempted to buy the web search company.

Their somewhat random offer was actually 62% above the “market value” of Yahoo, based on their share price at the time, a valuation most traditional businesses in the past would have jumped at.  But just how do you value a “Web Company”…  It’s certainly not an easy task, and (as MS have shown) not just down to the current stock market trends.

 So… will we see a MSNahoo?  Or will (as many as speculating) Google suddenly appear as a rival bidder.  And what will it all mean for us web users?  Less choice?  A better service?  Only time will tell…

Ps – I was only kidding about selling NSDesign for $40 billion…  I’d take less..

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